Art at Vassar, Fall 2004

FRIENDS OF THE FRANCES LEHMAN LOEB ART CENTER ART FALL 2004 AT VAS SAR Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel graduated from the San Francisco partments, municipal agencies, and testing facilities, requesting Evidence Art Institute in 1974. Fast friends who had in common an up- permission to rummage through their photographic files and carry bringing in the San Fernando Valley and a wry sense of humor, the off specimens. Examining some two million photographs in seventy two began collaborating on conceptual art inspired by the work archives over a two-year period, they edited their findings down Revisited of such southern Californian post-Pop masters as Ed Ruscha and to 89 prints, which were exhibited at the San Francisco Museum John Baldessari. For a billboard piece titled Oranges on Fire and of Modern Art in March 1977. The associated book, Evidence, a book, How to Read Music in One Evening (both 1974), Sultan became an instant and enduring classic among photographers. Like October 2 - December 19, 2004 and Mandel drew upon the wealth of anonymous imagery avail- the artists’ earlier ventures, Evidence was, in the artists’ words, “a able in low-budget advertisements and instruction manuals. Their poetic exploration upon the restructuring of imagery.” Stripped Prints and Drawings Galleries witty, offbeat projects questioned the principles of originality and of explanatory captions and divorced from their institutional authorship while moving art out of the museum and into more contexts, the banal photographs seemed to testify to cryptic and public arenas. dubious rituals, carried out in pursuit of lost questions. The Evidence project was a logical next step. Having secured When the show closed, The Center for Creative Photography an official-looking letter of support from the National Endowment in Tucson, Arizona acquired the entire set of Evidence prints for the Arts, the artists approached assorted industries, police de- and sent them on an international tour that included stops at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. In its travels, Evidence sowed no small amount of confusion, admiration, and controversy over the artistic appropriation of Anonymous photographer, “found” imagery. In the preceding decade, the snapshot, the news Photograph from Evidence photograph, postcards, advertising images, and other functional genres of imagery had begun appearing in museum contexts; the anonymous photograph had emerged as a central focus of curato- rial attention. By adopting the role of artist-curators, Sultan and Mandel assumed a complicated position within contemporary debates about the aesthetics of documentary photography and the role of Photographer Unknown in the medium’s evolution. Accompanied by a new edition of the 1977 book, Evidence Revisited pairs the original Evidence prints with correspondence and other historical documents that contextualize the project. It thereby lends a human dimension to an unassuming yet influential episode in photography’s postwar history and provides perspective on the now-ubiquitous role of found photographs in art. Mike Mandel spoke at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, October 12 in Vassar’s Taylor Hall 203. A reception for the exhibition followed in the Art Center. Evidence Revisited is presented at Vassar through the generous support of The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. Museum exhibitions normally lay emphasis upon “master” pieces: Second Sight: objects which, through singular quality and renown, stand for epochal transitions and definitive chapters in the evolution of art. In Second Sight the story is instead about continuity and Originality, constant, subtle amendment in art over time, told by objects from the Art Center’s collection that refer, in a variety of ways, to other Duplicity, and objects. The curators and the director have plumbed the vaults for rarely-exhibited works that have transmitted motifs, methods, styles, genres, ideas, and traditions from one context to another. the Object Ranging across all media and through geography and history, from the Middle Ages to the present, Second Sight brings together variant renditions and copy sketches, satires and homages, authorized January 14 - April 10, 2005 facsimiles and suspected forgeries, works of problematic attribution, renderings in alternative media, modern versions of classic themes, Prints and Drawings Galleries and postmodern reinventions of modernist icons. A tale of enduring national rivalries lies behind Washington Allston’s Cupid Playing with the Helmet of Mars (1804), a copy of a figure found in the foreground of Rubens’ Henry IV Receiving the Portrait of Marie de’ Medici (1621-25). Two decades after complet- ing his work in front of the original in the Luxembourg Palace, Allston recalled that French painters passing by, ignorant of color Andy Warhol (American, 1928- technique, had condescendingly regarded his pre-glaze colors as 1987), Jackie II, 1966. a sign of American incompetence. In contrast, a visiting Italian forebears, James McNeill Whistler’s lithograph Early Morning, Color screenprint in black and cardinal who witnessed the vernissage in process had praised the Battersea (1878). lavender inks on paper board. painter for knowing his business. Among satires in the exhibition is a seventeenth-century Flem- Gift of Drs. Alvin and Lenore Two self-portraits, painted and drawn, by a later American ish bronze sculpture of the Laocoon; its lead figure, Bacchus, has Weseley (Lenore S. Levine, artist, Milton Bellin (1913-1997), are remarkable for a degree been set upon not by serpents but by putti who are after his bowl class of 1954), 1992.32 of finish – and of inch-for-inch agreement with each other – at of wine. In James Gillray’s Weird Sisters: Ministers of Darkness, which manual skill borders on mechanical precision. Bellin’s Minions of the Moon (1791), an etching dedicated to Henry Fuseli, technique, in egg tempera on panel and ink and gouache on paper the latter’s image of the witches in Macbeth morphs into a trio of respectively, was characterized by meticulous attention to detail Tory ministers. The moon they worship is a two-faced monarchy, and perfection of surface. a smiling Queen on its sunny side and the King in the shadows. Photographers, working in a medium widely regarded as inher- Even viewers who consider themselves familiar with the Fran- ently mechanical, have employed diverse methods to avoid the ces Lehman Loeb Art Center’s collection will find much to be taint of “art reproduction” and to signal the status of their work worth a look, and a second look, in Second Sight. The exhibition as art in itself. In Second Sight an Orientalist platinum print of is made possible by the generous support of The Smart Family the Thames by Ernest Lamb is seen alongside one of its aesthetic Foundation. FALL 04 FRIENDS OF THE FRANCES LEHMAN LOEB ART CENTER PAGE TWO The feature article by Professor Andrew Watsky in this edition of support of Japanese sponsors. This growth was not an intellectual Director’s Art at Vassar deals with an exciting group of Japanese paintings fad but a clear evolutionary trend. When the Vassar art depart- and prints acquired over the past year by the Frances Lehman ment made a half-time position in Asian art full-time in 1994, it Loeb Art Center. While there have always been some Japanese signaled an important moment for the curriculum. In the hiring Message— works of art in the collection at Vassar, their presence and use of Andrew Watsky, the College also gained a scholar with a deep- have had a somewhat checkered distant past and an uneven recent seated love of works of art and much specialized knowledge in College one. Among the large collection of Asian objects given to the the field of Japanese paintings, prints, and objects. This interest College by Charles M. Pratt in 1936, were a number of objects led to bringing to Vassar loans of original works from a number of from the Japanese tea ceremony, mostly bowls and tea jars. This American museums and exhibitions focused on Japanese lacquer Collections and material, together with the better- known Chinese jades given by and prints. Such loans, over time, become expensive and it was Mr. Pratt, had remarkable breadth and depth as a collection. A increasingly clear that support of the program needed to be made New Directions number of the jades were perennially on view in Taylor Hall in tangible by beginning an initiative to broaden and strengthen the the eponymous “Jade Room,” a place that today retains the name holdings of Japanese art. The past fifteen months have brought some but where no jades have resided for fifteen years, a fact certainly remarkable works of Japanese art into the permanent collection, as puzzling to many students. The collection also contained a number Professor Watsky recounts in his article. The highlight, the early of Japanese prints of widely varying quality and condition that Buddhist Nachi shrine mandala painting, arrived in October of were not much utilized. this year, much to the enthusiastic surprise of scholars in this field. The problem with this Asian material was that it existed largely Coincidentally, it has been a very good time to make Japanese outside of curricular support and use. While Asian art was taught at acquisitions and one senses that there is greater value for money Vassar intermittently during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, it was largely spent in this field over many areas of Western art. done by part-time or visiting faculty whose responsibilities did not The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center will remain committed, include the building or advocacy of the collection. In fact, much where possible, to focusing acquisition support on the important to our present chagrin, a large number of the Chinese jades and areas of growth and use within the curriculum, both within the art Japanese ceramics were deaccessioned and sold in the early 1980s, department and, potentially, in other areas of study.

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